Equinox/p2/Director application

The director application is a headless way of performing some of the p2 operations such as installing or uninstalling installable units. Given the appropriate metadata, this application is capable on provisioning a complete installation from scratch or simply extending your application.

Depending on the needs, this application can be executed inside or outside of the application being provisioned

Terminology

Director application

the application performing p2 operations such as install or uninstall. This application is provided by the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director.app bundle.

Provisioning operation

an operation installing, uninstalling features.

Target product

the installation targeted by the provisioning operation.

Running inside the target application

In this mode, the provisioning operation happens from within the targeted produced that you are provisioning. It is equivalent to starting up the targeted product and using the p2 UI to perform the equivalent operation.

This means that the target application has to be in a runnable state and that it has to contain the director application bundle. Also since the target product will have run, cache files will have been created in the configuration folder (e.g. configuration/org.eclipse.osgi).

The following example shows the command line used to install CDT into the SDK. CDT is obtained from a local update site.